


The Peace of the Blue

by Brosedshield



Series: MCU Character Studies [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Brainwashing, Character Study, Gen, Mental Coercion, Tesseract
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-03
Updated: 2014-04-03
Packaged: 2018-01-18 00:21:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1408057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Brosedshield/pseuds/Brosedshield
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peace for Clint is the second before he looses the arrow for a hard shot, when he knows in his bones that it’s going fly true. The feeling that rides him for three days beneath the thrall of Loki and the tesseract is closest, of all, to that arrow’s flight.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Peace of the Blue

**Author's Note:**

> This work is much better for the input of LaviniaLavender, J, and Alice. They are rock stars and just generally really cool people. 
> 
> The story is more meta than plot, but I really loved the idea of Clint's headspace within the confines of the tesseract. Hope you enjoy!

It’s peaceful in the blue.

Peace for Clint, generally, is a cold beer and a game on the TV where he doesn’t care about the teams. Maybe a cold beer with Coulson in that no-man’s land time between good missions when nothing really hurts but the strain of muscles that he’s maybe pushed too hard on the range, his handler’s mouth curved in that wry amusement that can bite (but never bites Clint). Peace is waking up hungover with Nat’s smiling face hanging over him, pushing her off and laughing at the dumb shit he can’t even remember, though the laughing makes his burned-out vodka brain hurt like a mother. Peace is the second before he looses the arrow for a hard shot, when he knows in his bones that it’s going fly true.

The feeling that rides him for three days from the second the shit called Loki slides an extraterrestrial spear into his chest is closest, of all, to that arrow flight.

(He didn’t think this at the time, he didn’t have the capability or the freedom, but it crashed down on him when he saw Nat standing over him again. It was like waking up drunk, fucking hungover from bad drugs when they’re on an undercover op, and nothing makes sense, nothing focuses, because he could remember what he did, horrible things that he shouldn’t even have considered even on the worst kind of undercover clusterfuck gone bad, but for that second he couldn’t remember _why_ …and then she kicked him out again).

He told the truth to Hill when he said Loki hadn’t told him who he was. The pretender prince of Asgard (or perhaps true prince of Jotenheim, whichever way you want to roll the dice; he gets blue creeping around the edges of his eyes just thinking about which was more true) had reserved his monologuing for those he saw as a threat still to be crushed. Loki had cared only what his slaves could do _for_ him, not that they understood who he was.

He had probed every weakness in Clint’s soul, reached out through the blue into places that, with all his brilliant eyesight, he had never seen, and turned it on those who were closest to him. Who would have thought that Natasha’s walls had so many cracks, when examined under the lens of a friend’s eyes. Somehow he had stopped himself from telling Loki her strengths, just as he had never breathed a word about Coulson. Loki hadn’t asked, and some part of Clint had kept those most precious people hidden down where it couldn’t hurt.

Loki would have said that he expanded Clint’s mind. Clint thinks, now, sitting silent with his hands clasped at his knees while he can feel the therapist’s eyes on him, that Loki closed it. That he narrowed Clint down to such a pinpoint focus that there was nothing else left. The world is supposed to have kids playing football in the streets, beer, baseball, New York cabbies taking corners too fast, a bowstring breaking in practice and the shape of a man’s ass in too-tight pants as he turns with a smile on his lips.

It’s not supposed to be so perfectly, clearly blue, as though there is nothing else in the world but that one lone destiny. It’s not supposed to be peaceful and sleepless and strained like the last weeping note of a violin in an empty concert hall, or a telescope flying off into a starless sky. There’s not supposed to be that much peace. 

The tesseract had shown Selvig the Truth, and Clint suspected it had hastened Loki’s self-destruct (high as he was on the drugged illusion of freedom), but for him it had always only shown him his next target.

Clint hadn’t needed to understand who Loki was. He understood enough. He understood taking orders. It hadn’t been the first time that he had lied and killed in the service of liars and killers.

SHIELD had enough enemies who would work for anyone who might give them a shot at taking out Fury or the Helicarrier. Later, in the long parade of debriefs and shrinks, Selvig hadn’t had the presence of mind to wonder Clint why he had contacts that could supply such weapons and personnel at such short notice. Clint was grateful for that, though he wasn’t fooling himself. One of these days, someone with authority would ask the right question. And when that day came, Clint was pretty sure he would just disappear.

He was fighting Natasha, in the end, all his concentration on her threat, as something that he had to distract so that the Plan could continue. He used all the moves he knew, but even surrounded by the blue focus he knew he couldn’t beat her. Experience said he had less than a 7% chance of bringing the Widow down. The best he could do was delay the inevitable.

Still he fought, because that was the mission too, to do his best in the face of things that could not be stopped just as he couldn’t drown out the blue.

She got in a good hit, and he went down, blinking up. In that second, the blue faded, the peace shaken in his head, and the only thing he thought was that he didn’t understand. What was happening, why they were fighting, what possible reason would he have to take down the woman in front of him when that was never actually a viable option? The only memories he had were old, bad ones that made no more sense than the situation.

“Tasha?” he asked.

Thank fuck she would never expect him, in his right mind, to use that pet name again. She frowned, swung, and the perfect clarity of the world shut off like a flipped switch.

When he came to, the world was flush, blue and bright red bleeding together like blood in Vegas water, artifice and injury grappling for space in his brain, distorting everything.  He saw the patterns then, saw the parts of himself that had been absorbed into the Pattern, and it terrified him in a way he to this day still can’t get his hands around, can’t find words for. Shaking his head made the pieces rattle, but didn’t make anything snap back into place. Maybe that was better. Maybe he didn’t want to know.

“Clint. You’re going to be all right.” Natasha was by his side, concerned and brittle like a woman riding the edge between battles.

“You know that? Is that what you know?” He sounded damaged, drifting, and maybe that was a good thing. Maybe if Nat understood that, she would put him down before that bastard could use him to hurt anyone again.

He’s been used before to hurt. He has nightmares about that sometimes (probably not as often as he should, if he’s a good person), about the light in distant eyes being snuffed by the impact of his arrow, the voice in his ear whispering _Good job, Barton_ like he remembered to pick up an extra six-pack of the good beer at the grocery store. It’s different when he’s hurting his own team, the side he thought he was fighting for. It hurts, in a way, because it doesn’t feel all that different: it’s the same pull of the bow, the same release, the same bright focus he loves.

“I’ve got no window. I’ve got to flush him out. Have you ever had someone take your brain and play, pull you out and stuff someone else in?” He shouldn’t have asked that, knew that as soon as the words crossed his lips, because he _did_ know, probably better than anyone but Coulson the places that she had come from, the people who had whispered in her ears all those years. “You know what it’s like to be unmade?”

“You know that I do,” she said, eyes flat, tone carrying the weight of things they have never quite dared to say to each other, in spite of everything they have seen.

“Why am I back? How did you get him out?”

“Cognitive recalibration.” Her lips curled in a slight smile. “I hit you really hard in the head.”

He tried to ask about the other agents but Nat cut him off fast, which meant it was bad. Of course, he could have figured that out because of how it was just she and he, the two of them. No medical personnel, no extra guard, no one, meant there was no one free to worry about a compromised asset as they were struggling to keep SHIELD afloat.

Fuck, when it came to the Helicarrier, that probably wasn’t even a metaphor.

He knew the situation was worse than he thought when Nat, his cool, competent, levelheaded-bordering-on-frigid Nat, said they had to go after Loki, take him down no matter what.

“What did Loki do to you?” He remembered the late night conversations, ‘debriefs’ he had participated in easily because it was the mission, the adversary, the information that was asked of him. Information on the Captain, Stark and Natasha he gave without hesitation, because there was no room for it in the blue.

Later, she would tell him about Loki’s threats. That he would have killed Clint without a second thought after using him up. Clint knows that what she told him is not everything that was said, that Clint getting his skull bashed in couldn’t be everything (he’s gotten that particular threat before and Nat just laughed) but he accepted what she was willing to share, knowing that it would be less now. 

All she said then (and all she needed to say) in that little Hellicarrier containment chamber, was: “I’ve been compromised. I’ve got red in my ledger. I’d like to wipe it out.”

When the Captain showed up, Clint didn’t think that he was going to be able to join them, didn’t think that they’d trust him (and they shouldn’t, not with the blue crawling along his peripheral vision like a pack of dogs around an injured rabbit).

But Nat vouched for him. Yeah, he’s got a suit. And he’s never been so glad to have some kind of armor, some kind of support to step into as he was that day.

There were some bad moments during the fight. He crashed through a window from ten stories up and it hurt like fuck. But the worse was when the blue rose up for him, when the flashes of the portal on the edge of his vision almost made him aim at the wrong guy in a suit.

The thing is, he knew what he was doing the whole time. He _knew_. Like Selvig built a safety measure into the machine that he believed would show them a new universe (and it did, one just as fucked and violent and vicious as the one they already had, thanks very much), Clint had maybe done his best, but he had been in there the entire time.

He heard it through Natasha’s comm when she confronted Selvig after he got his own “cognitive recalibration.” When the scientist told her they could stop this thing in its tracks. The words stick with Clint, still resonate even after the battle, even after he was told the true body count and that Coulson is dead.

Selvig said, then, that he had known what he was doing. That something in him had fought, that something in him had created an emergency shut-off that would stop the madness that had taken them both. (Clint and Selvig got together later and got fucking drunk, but Clint couldn’t stay because he felt the blue crawling back up into him with every shot, could feel it catching between them like a case of the chickenpox and doing even greater damage the second time around).

But Clint doubts. He goes to therapy, he sits silently in his room (cell) at SHIELD HQ, he spars with Natasha, and he goes through Coulson’s collection gently, as though handling the old red, white, and blue memorabilia will keep the memories of the man alive as he is not. Clint waits to get better.

And he wonders if the power of the tesseract lay in the same weakness that allowed them to defeat it. It never once forced him against his nature, never demanded anything of him that he hadn’t offered a dozen times before.

Maybe that was what that green-eyed bastard had meant, when he said that Clint had heart. Maybe he meant that he had served so many soulless masters in the past that once more was no particular challenge. Maybe he meant that Clint could last longer without sleep and without rest and do dirty things without ever once asking why. What’s one more red mark in a ledger that’s already bloody as a sliced vein?

That is why he fears the blue: the slow, sweet peace that he had felt through all of his time with Loki. Because he feels it creeping back sometimes, even now that Loki is safely imprisoned in Asgard and the others have returned to their lives. Because he doesn’t think that anything he did was something that, under different situations, in different times, he wouldn’t have chosen. 

After all, you can’t fight or protect against yourself.


End file.
